With the rapid increase in information technology utilization, the requirement of storing large amounts of data has also increased. It is necessary in most business applications that the data be safeguarded from loss due to physical damage of storage devices, accidental deletion, or security compromises. Thus, backup systems are often used to maintain and preserve data in case of loss.
Data can be stored in a data container, a data structure or abstract data type whose instances are collections of other objects. Examples include, but are not limited to Virtual Machines and storage objects provided by cloud vendors such as Amazon S3™ or Windows Azure™ Blob Storage. Data containers can be very convenient, but they can present problems in backing up the data they contain. Although data containers are particularly useful for large-scale objects and collections of objects, the large amount of data may presents problem in performing backup operations.